Mafia Wars didn’t infect US drones, a careless user did

The people who program malware are typically a cagey bunch, and they truly clever ones are a step or two ahead of the security community. Sometimes, however, the systems they compromise don’t line up with their intended goals. Whoever it is that’s behind the virus infecting the U.S. unmanned drone fleet, for example. It’s unlikely that they’re going to steal any Mafia Wars logins from an autonomous airplane, but that’s what the malware is built to do.

That’s according to a new report from The Atlantic, which claims the credential-swiping virus propagated itself from an external hard drive. The Department of Defense famously banned the use of such devices on its network back in 2008 and again at the end of last year, so it’s a bit surprising to hear that an infected USB storage device might be to blame.

One important note: if you’re a Mafia Wars player and you’re concerned by The Atlantic’s assertion that the virus “came from Mafia Wars,” don’t be. The game itself is perfectly safe, and it’s much more likely that this type of virus would be picked up on disreputable sites pushing Mafia Wars cheats and hacks.

If Mafia Wars itself was pushing malware to its users, you can be sure it would have been reported by vocal security firms like Sophos and F-Secure on their blogs — especially because Mafia Wars runs on Facebook.

They haven’t reported on any such occurrences, however, because there haven’t been any. This is a case of security software failing to detect an infection on a removable drive — and a user being foolish enough to violate a military ban that was enacted to prevent exactly this sort of thing from happening.